Someday people will look back on these times and shake their heads in disbelief. It will be like when we look back at bleeding, the procedure where ‘doctors’ would intentionally open a patients vein to let diseased blood escape, weakening the sick even further.

One hundred years ago there was no obesity epidemic. Fifty years ago there was no obesity epidemic. In my lifetime there was a time that nobody counseled that you had to eat less or exercise more to lose weight. There were not fitness gyms and gurus in every village in the land. Free weights were for bulking up, not slimming down.

There were fat kids in school, but most kids in school were just like I was, skinny little things that ate the breakfast mom made, the peanut butter sandwich at lunch with a whole milk chaser, and whatever was on the table was dinner, no complaining allowed. We cleaned our plates, because there were starving children in India.

Something has changed and it is not us. It is known, and proven, that you can eat as many calories as you can without gaining weight. It is proven that a calorie is not a calorie once the food is inside of your body. Eating a ‘calorie’ of sugar is different in every single respect from eating a calorie of fat. Once in your mouth and it dissolves it takes a different path to the cells where it is to be used than fat.

Sugar is everywhere and if you eat any industrially prepared food there is an excellent chance that it will contain sugar, whether it makes any sense to you that it would or not. Sugar is a very broad category of food, one that includes a great number of names. There are 61 different names for it that may be found on food labels. 

• Agave nectar
• Barbados sugar
• Barley malt
• Barley malt syrup
• Beet sugar
• Brown sugar
• Buttered syrup
• Cane juice
• Cane juice crystals
• Cane sugar
• Caramel
• Carob syrup
• Castor sugar
• Coconut palm sugar
• Coconut sugar
• Confectioner’s sugar
• Corn sweetener
• Corn syrup
• Corn syrup solids
• Date sugar
• Dehydrated cane juice
• Demerara sugar
• Dextrin
• Dextrose
• Evaporated cane juice
• Free-flowing brown sugars
• Fructose
• Fruit juice
• Fruit juice concentrate
• Glucose
• Glucose solids
• Golden sugar
• Golden syrup
• Grape sugar
• HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup)
• Honey
• Icing sugar
• Invert sugar
• Malt syrup
• Maltodextrin
• Maltol
• Maltose
• Mannose
• Maple syrup
• Molasses
• Muscovado
• Palm sugar
• Panocha
• Powdered sugar
• Raw sugar
• Refiner’s syrup
• Rice syrup
• Saccharose
• Sorghum Syrup
• Sucrose
• Sugar (granulated)
• Sweet Sorghum
• Syrup
• Treacle
• Turbinado sugar
• Yellow sugar

Sugar is a chemical, one molecule of glucose that is attached to one molecule of fructose. After dissolving the two chemicals take different paths. Fructose cannot be used anywhere in your body but your liver. Both will be taken apart and reassembled inside of your fat cells. The combination of the two is worse than either of them on the body. Alone, glucose does not taste sweet–think of eating a raw potato, it contains glucose. Alone, fructose is mildly sweet, combined they are what you know and love, ‘sugar’.

Sugar (sucrose) is a special case. Just like cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive drugs, sugar appears to induce an exaggerated response in that region of the brain known as the reward center— the nucleus accumbens. This suggests that the relatively intense cravings for sugar— a sweet tooth— may be explained by the intensity of the dopamine secretion in the brain when we consume sugar. When the nucleus accumbens “is excessively activated by sweet food or powerful drugs,” says Bartley Hoebel of Princeton, “it can lead to abuse and even addiction. When this system is under-active, signs of depression ensue.” Rats can be easily addicted to sugar, according to Hoebel, and will demonstrate the physical symptoms of opiate withdrawal when forced to abstain.

Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 9042-9048). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sugar is special and it is known, no–proven, that the reason we are gaining weight is sugar. Carbs and refined starches are an additional problem, but alone the glucose in these are not the demon that sugar is. Food scientists do not add hidden starches to increase the tastiness of eight out of ten foods on the shelf, because starches do not add flavor. No, the reason we are gaining weight has nothing to do with calories or exercise!

Someday our thin and healthy ancestors will look back at us with amazement, because we refused to see what will be obvious to them. Eat sugar in moderation and thrive. Eat it to excess and die sick and fat.

I was reading the New York Times this morning and the article was about people who completely overturn their lives to quit ‘over eating.’ Their addiction to food is so strong that only by quitting their jobs, selling their homes and moving closer to the rehab center that helped them lose weight could they find a way to keep it off. Habits are known to be easier to break if you get out of the environment in which they were formed. It is known though, proven clinically, that it is possible to not gain weight even if you eat fifty percent more calories per day than you do right now. Overeating does not cause people to store fat and then not use it. Starvation will produce weight loss, but it is not because of the calorie reduction. It is because of the sugar reduction.

I am not making these things up, they are actual studies in labs around the world. If a person has insulin in the blood stream the fat cells in his body will not release fat into the blood. Insulin in the blood means to the energy system of the body that there is still free glucose in the blood. Insulin has a role to keep blood sugar in tight bounds, since out of bounds sugar can kill. In a normal person, say a child fifty years ago, every night while he sleeps his blood sugar levels dropped overnight as ever cell in his body consumed energy in the blood. To support cellular life the fat cells would disassemble triglycerides contained within them and the FFA (free fatty acids) produced would be transported by cholesterol molecules to the hungry organ, brain or muscle cells that needed it. Overnight we all lost weight. I, personally, lose about two pounds every night.

These days most people still have insulin in the blood instead, keeping the fats locked up in fat storage and we wake up hungry, having lost very little fat overnight. The day starts with a big hit of sugar, even if we eat something healthy like sweetened yogurt or something sweet and starchy like cereal, chased down with liquid candy like chocolate milk or orange juice. There is no time in the day for fat to be used if we snack and eat insulin producing foods all day long, perhaps even waking in the night for a dose.

Overeating is not the problem…lazy living is not the problem. Sugar is the problem. Artificial foods laced with sugar are the problem. Articles like the one in the Times today, that tell you that to lose weight you could change everything, spend time in rehab, move closer to a center that is surrounded with ‘people like you’ is the problem. You are ALREADY surrounded by people like you. We all share your problem, we are all buried in foods containing unsafe levels of sugar. You cannot escape this environment and you do not need to suffer hunger pains for the rest of your life to lose weight.

All you have to do to lose weight is give up sugar. You can still eat sugar in birthday cake every year. You can have dessert after your anniversary dinner. You can eat sugar when you mean to and it would never be a problem. Put sugar in every drink you take, hide sugar in every bite of food, then it is a national problem. The science is in.

The perceived taste of sweetness is sufficient to stimulate insulin secretion. Just as Pavlov demonstrated that dogs will salivate at the sound of a bell they have learned to associate with feeding, Stephen Woods and his colleagues demonstrated that rats will secrete insulin when confronted with similar eating-related stimuli. (These researchers arbitrarily chose the smell of mentholatum, a mixture of menthol and petroleum jelly, more commonly used as a topical rub for chest colds.) Humans will do the same. This reflexive release of insulin, Nicolaidis suggested, is “pre-adaptive”: it anticipates the effects of a meal or a particular food, and so prepares the body. As Mark Friedman describes it, this cephalic release of insulin also serves to clear the circulation of “essentially anything an animal or a person can use for fuel. Not just blood sugar, but fatty acids, as well. All those nutrients just go away.” Hence, the thought of eating makes us hungry, because the insulin secreted in response depletes the bloodstream of the fuel that the peripheral tissues and organs need to survive.

Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 8988-8996). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Insulin locks the fat in your fat cells down. Even the thought of a sweet treat can cause it to be release, and you will experience hunger from it. Has this ever happened to you that you were not hungry then you saw a treat or something delicious and it gave you hunger pains? This is proof of the science of insulin that I describe. Insulin strips your blood of energy, forcing it into muscle, organ, fat, because you are about to add sugar to the blood stream. To keep it from going to high, the body forces it low. Insulin in circulation keeps fat there indefinitely. It’s why its easy to put on weight but hard to lose it.